Helping software testers remain relevant and employable

Test Reporting in an agile environment

A low tech dashboard is a great way of communicating the state of the software mid sprint. At the end of the sprint, the board is fairly meaningless unless you have stories incomplete. But mid-sprint it’s a great visual way of showing progress. I.e. we’ve hit this feature in depth and it looks ok.

It’s another indicator of how we are progressing. Look at it as a quality indicator that compliments the velocity indicators like burndowns and burnups. It’s a clear, visual representation of the “quality” of the software from the testers point of view. It doesn’t need weighty metrics to back it up – although that may help in some environments. It doesn’t need to be absolutely accurate, just like the burndown report and it doesn’t need to be complicated.

It needs to be simple, easy to read, easy to understand and simple. It’s about communicating to all stakeholders (and other teams) where we are at with the software ‘quality’.

And when we get to the end of the sprint and we have stories incomplete then the dashboard can be a good way of highlighting where quality is lacking.

A few years ago I created an equivalent that was a ‘mood board’ with smileys which the testers would put up on paper to show visitors to the team area what mood we were in (happy, sad, nonplussed, ill, bored, tired, giggly, etc). A visual representation of how we were progressing. And it worked wonders and the management loved it more than the metrics. And believe it or not – that was in a waterfall environment…